MOLLY IVINS: Barbara Jordan, a Great Spirit, is Gone; Hey,
There's Gold in that that Telecom Bill!

FREE LANCE:

First Vote Disappoints

Civil rights, consumer, labor and elderly groups were
surprised in December when U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.'s first
official vote was to override President Clinton's veto of
legislation that would limit the liability of accountants and
corporations in securities fraud cases. The legislation (H.R.
1058) became law last month over Clinton's veto.

Corporate Crime Reporter, a public interest newsletter, quoted
Robert Creamer, director of Illinois Public Action, the largest
public interest group in the state, saying Jackson's vote was "a
mistake." He added, "We had not communicated with Jesse Jr.
concerning this matter." Instead, the newsletter, citing a source
close to the override battle, reported two House colleagues,
former Black Panther Bobby Rush (D-Illinois) and Edolphus Towns
(D-New York) advised Jackson not "to offend big business on your
first vote."

The National Rainbow Coalition had called on members of
Congress to defeat the legislation. Before his election to
Congress, Jackson Jr. was the Rainbow Coalition's field director,
and Jesse Jackson Sr., Congressman Jackson's father, had urged
various members of Congress to defeat the legislation.

"Access to justice is a seamless web," Jackson Sr. wrote to
members of Congress about similar legislation in 1994. "If
lawyers, accountants, corporations, banks and insurance companies
can hold themselves immune to suits by victims of fraud, their
next step will be to gain immunity to lawsuits by victims of
redlining and discrimination."

Creamer said that Congressman Jackson's first vote "means we
are going to have to do some serious work to make sure he
understands firsthand the importance of the civil justice system
to the average citizen," the newsletter reported.

FREE LANCE:

Bishops Attack 'Catholic Alliance'

Protestant televangelist Pat Robertson would like to extend
his influence among conservative Catholics, but his newly
organized Catholic Alliance has come under fire from Roman
Catholic clergy and bishops, who say the movement is misleading
their parishioners about the church's stands on social
issues.

Bishops and priests say the Catholic Alliance, which was
created as an arm of the predominantly Protestant Christian
Coalition last fall, is in doctrinal conflict with Catholic church
leaders on a range of issues, from the death penalty to welfare
reform to gun control, and are warning Catholics to be wary of the
organization.

The latest criticisms came in December, when the Most Rev.
Thomas J. O'Brien, bishop of the 326,000-member Diocese of
Phoenix, blasted the Catholic Alliance agenda as "carefully
crafted to support directions in Congress that the Catholic
bishops and Catholic Charities USA have opposed."

Catholic bishops frequently are a target of scorn by liberals
for their unstinting opposition to abortion and conservative
stances on other social issues. But unlike some church leaders, at
least the Catholics tend to be consistent in their respect for the
life of the born, as well as the unborn.

Flat tax: few specifics

The National Commission on Economic Growth and Tax Reform,
appointed by the Republican Congress and led by Reagan-era Housing
and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp, pumped life into the
idea of a flat tax with its endorsement of the concept. But the
commission report was vague about the tax rate, whether it would
apply to unearned income or whether a new tax code should include
deductions for gifts to charity and home mortgage interest.

According to some reports Kemp said he envisioned the tax rate
being somewhere around 19 percent. (Current rates run from 15
percent to just under 40 percent.) He was to testify on the
commission's findings at a Jan. 31 Senate Finance Committee
hearing.

Some Republican presidential candidates who a week before had
ridiculed Steve Forbes, the multimillionaire publishing executive
who has made the flat tax the defining element of his Republican
presidential campaign, began to sidle up to the idea. Sen. Phil
Gramm, who a week earlier had derided Forbes' plan as a "budget
buster," trotted out his own flat tax rate. Majority Leader Bob
Dole suggested Forbes' proposal was a naive notion of an untested
politician, but he later acknowledged that it may drive the
election.

Forbes has been vague about his flat tax proposal, but he has
referred to a 17-percent flat tax advocated by House Minority
Leader Dick Armey. Critics believe that while wealthy and
low-income families would get tax breaks under such a plan (and
Forbes' taxes could be cut by up to two-thirds), taxes would
increase on the middle class.

Largely overlooked in the hoopla is a greatly simplified
progressive tax plan proposed by House Minority Leader Dick
Gephardt. His plan would tax 75 percent of families at 10 percent,
after standard deductions and exemptions. But marginal rates would
increase to 34 percent for incomes over $264,450 under the
Missouri Democrat's plan.

Gephardt notes that Citizens for Tax Justice found that a
family of four earning $45,000 now pays approximately $3,800 in
taxes. Under Armey's plan, that family's taxes would more than
double, to $8,000. It would pay $3,230, or $570 less than the
current levy, under Gephardt's plan.

A family of four would pay no more than 10 percent up to about
$60,000 in income, and an individual would pay no more than ten
percent up to about $32,000, he explained. His plan would keep the
home-mortgage interest deduction. And Gephardt would require a
national referendum before Congress could raise tax rates again.
"That way, people will know that in exchange for losing all those
loopholes and shelters, they're really going to be able to count
on lower rates," he explained.

"Finally, my plan would tax all income--earned or
unearned--exactly the same, so that investors and speculators
wouldn't get the huge, deficit-busting windfall the Republicans
want to give them. That's why my plan would not increase the
deficit by one red cent."

Bank fees drive customers to credit unions

Bank fees rose at four times the rate of inflation between
1990 and 1993, according to a study by the Consumer Federation of
America and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, which
suggested that consumers consider switching to credit unions as an
alternative to banks.

The average cost of interest-bearing bank checking accounts
jumped 22 percent from 1990 to 1993, to $197 a year, the study
found. During the same period, the cost of a regular bank checking
account rose 18.5 percent to $184 a year. Consumers with savings
account balances of $200 lose an average $23 a year because the
fees to maintain that amount offset the interest earned, the
survey says.

Credit unions require an average minimum balance of $136.67
for free checking, compared with banks $494 average. And only 17
percent of credit unions reported that they expect to raise or
initiate fees on checking/share draft programs this year.

EULOGY:

Remembering 'Smiling Ralph' Yarborough

Ralph Webster Yarborough, who bucked a conservative tide in
the 1950s to win election--and twice won re-election--to the U.S.
Senate as a progressive populist, died on Jan. 27. He was 92.

Yarborough, whose motto was "Let's put the jam on the lower
shelf, so the little people can reach it," sponsored many of the
landmark bills of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program. He also
encouraged a generation of progressive Democrats in Texas at a
time when ballot-crossing conservatives shut them out of party
functions.

"He represented the heart of the populist movement, the notion
that it's ordinary workaday people who matter in our lives and
matter in our society, that those are the people we should be
investing in--not the elites, but the many. That's what
Yarborough's career in politics, in government and in his personal
life was all about," said Jim Hightower, former Texas agriculture
commissioner who was an aide to Yarborough from 1967-69.

Yarborough ran two Quixotic races in the early 1950s against
conservative Democrat Allan Shivers, who led most of the state's
Democratic officials in cross-filing as Republicans to highlight
their disputes with the national Democratic leadership.

When Shivers stepped down in 1956, the conservatives put up
Price Daniel, a U.S. senator, who beat Yarborough by only 3,171
votes out of nearly 1.4 million cast. Yarborough believed the
election had been stolen from him. But in the special election for
the vacant Senate seat, Yarborough won in a field of 22 candidates
with 38 percent of the vote.

Once in Washington Yarborough defied segregationist Southern
Democrats. He was one of only five Southern senators who voted for
the Civil Rights Act of 1957, but he was elected to a full term in
1958. After election to his second full term in 1964 he proceeded
to sponsor or help pass such landmark bills as the Civil Rights
Act of 1964, the Cold War GI Bill of 1966, the National Cancer Act
of 1970 and so many bills giving aid to public schools and
universities that his Senate colleagues called him "Mr.
Education."

He was a major sponsor of the Occupational Health and Safety
Act, the Community Mental Health Center Act, the Bilingual
Education Act and he helped develop Medicare and Medicaid. He
co-wrote the Endangered Species Act of 1969.

He also was responsible for the appointment of William Wayne
Justice to the federal bench in East Texas. Justice, once
considered the most hated man in Texas, presided over the
desegregation of Texas public schools, secured the right to
education of the children of undocumented aliens and forced
reforms of the Texas Department of Corrections.

Arnold Garcia Jr., editorial page editor of the Austin
American-Statesman, got his college education by virtue of the
updated GI Bill, so the talk about Yarborough being a champion of
"the little guy" was more than an abstraction for him.

"The starched white shirt crowd didn't much care for him. The
unstarched blue collars loved him," Garcia wrote. "... If the
workplace for someone in Tulia, Texas, or Winona, Minn., is just a
bit safer today, it's because of Yarborough and people like him.
If some veteran is holding down a good job because the GI Bill
helped with college, he can say, 'Thanks Senator.' I know I
did."

(If you have Internet access, check out a Yarborough tribute
site at http://texasrural.org/ Yarborough/yarbhome.html/) Martha
Ragland, Tennessee pioneer, dies at 89

Tennessee progressives mourned the death of civil-rights
leader Martha Ragland, who died Jan. 18 at 89.

"She was Tennessee's first modern-day feminist, and she made
things a lot easier for the rest of us," Carole Bucy, who worked
with Ragland on the League of Women Voters, told The Nashville
Tennessean. Ragland trekked the state with Margaret Sanger to
promote birth control. In the early 1940s she helped revive the
state League of Women Voters. In 1948 Ragland organized the
successful Senate campaign of Estes Kefauver. she also helped Al
Gore Sr. win a seat in the Senate. She continued in several other
efforts to promote women's organization.

"The progressives have lost their voice here in Tennessee,"
reader Bob Allen wrote to us.
If you are a progressive populist ...

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